Turning a stringout into a searchable shot log
StoryFolder —
Part of: How to show a producer or client your selects when they don't have the NLE open
Last updated: 2 September 2026.
Five weeks after you finished the selects pass, someone asks for the bit where the site manager laughs at his own joke. You know it exists. You know roughly which week it was shot. The stringout is a 90-minute file on a drive and the only way in is the playhead.
Import that file into StoryFolder and it stops being one video. It becomes a few hundred shots, each with a thumbnail, a frame range and its own metadata, and each carrying whatever the transcript says was spoken inside it. Type "site manager" or a phrase you half-remember, and the board narrows to the shots that match; the same box searches your whole library, so the answer survives moving on to the next project. When you need the log outside the app, the spreadsheet export writes both a CSV and an XLSX.
What it will not do is get you back into the edit. There is no FCPXML, XML, EDL or AAF coming out, and the timings in the sheet are elapsed from the first frame of the file you imported rather than the source's own timecode. This is a tool for finding the shot again and for handing someone a readable log. Conforming it is still the NLE's job. The spreadsheet export and custom fields are both Pro; the search, the transcript and the heart are not.
Detecting the shots, correcting the boundaries and publishing the result are covered in full in the pillar article on turning a selects reel into something a client can browse. This page is about what happens after that: what to write down, what the search will actually match, and exactly what lands in the sheet.
What does "stringout" mean in this workflow?
It means whatever the person who handed you the file meant, and there is no single answer. Frame.io's Workflow Guide defines it broadly, as "any time in the post process where you put together a large selection of footage in order to see it all at once and know what your options are". On a 2012 Creative COW thread about stringouts, Shane Ross described something much narrower: "sound bites strung out back to back, with no footage covering it, no music, no pacing… Also called a RADIO CUT."
Both are in use. Before you log the file, work out which one you have, because it changes what is worth writing down:
| What you were given | What it contains | What to log |
|---|---|---|
| Everything usable, in shooting order | Broad footage pool | Location, subject, shot type |
| Dialogue bites only | Interview audio, no coverage | Speaker, topic, the transcript |
| Dailies for review | A day's selected material | Day, scene, take, usable or not |
| A themed documentary breakdown | Grouped by character, event or theme | The theme it was grouped by |
One warning about vocabulary. "Scrub" is the verb for dragging a playhead. One StoryFolder customer names their review-everything pass SCRUB v1 in board titles, which is their own label rather than an industry term, and using it with a new client will get you a blank look. The sibling article on stringout, selects, assembly and radio cut has the sourced definitions and where practitioners disagree.
What is the minimum metadata worth adding?
The heart, and one field whose values you will genuinely type into a search box later.
That is a deliberately small answer, because the argument about how much to log is real and both sides are credible. On the Creative COW thread about metadata in post, Mark Raudonis put one position bluntly: "Logging metadata is NOT editing!" Tero Ahlfors, in the same discussion, said "I rarely add any metadata in my projects." Against them sits the position that organising is where you find the story, and the memorable version of the counter-argument from the same research is one practitioner's stated ceiling: pick one metadata field, nothing more complicated than "broll, school, exterior wide".
What paying customers actually do supports the small answer. In a September 2026 reading of 813 boards from 295 paying accounts, the heaviest user of custom fields had filled Client, Job# and Title 3,852 times each. Three fields. Somebody else added a field named Find in Folder, which is a person building the exact bridge this article is about. And an account with 53 boards of archive footage has zero notes on any of them: they wanted the visual index and stopped there, which is a legitimate outcome.
The free plan gives you the heart and a Tags field. It also seeds a board with twelve text fields named Key Takeaways, Interpretation, Symbolism and so on, which are shipped defaults written for someone studying a film rather than logging a shoot; delete the ones you will not use. Creating your own fields — a Location text field, a Usable? checkbox, a 1–5 star rating — is Pro. So is the spreadsheet export.
Two mechanics worth knowing before you start typing. Rating, dropdown, checkbox and text fields all write across a multi-selection in one gesture, and that counts as one entry in version history, so setting forty shots to Location: Loading Bay is one action you can undo. Tags refuse to edit under a multi-selection; the inspector replaces the editor with "Tags edit one shot at a time". If your one field is going to be a tag field, that is the friction you are signing up for.
What can the search box actually find?
Typing into the search box matches your text, dropdown, tag and number field values as case-insensitive substrings, plus every transcript segment that overlaps a shot's time range. Rating and checkbox fields hold no text and are reachable only through a filter chip. There is no boolean syntax, no wildcard, and no way to sort the results.
A number matches on its printed text, so typing 4 also returns 42 and 400.
So the search is only as good as what you typed, plus everything anybody said on camera. That second half is doing a lot of work: the transcript is generated on device and is not paywalled, which means a board with no metadata at all becomes searchable by dialogue as soon as transcription finishes, and that starts by itself once the import completes.
Three behaviours to hold in your head:
- A typed query overrides the favourites-only and show-hidden toggles. It does not stack with them. The reasoning is defensible, since a search that also honoured show-hidden would silently drop a hidden shot you literally searched for, but it means "favourites only, then search" is not a thing you can express that way.
- Advanced filter chips apply on top of whatever the query returned. The chips read in the field's own words:
Rating is at least 4,Tags has any of drone, exterior,Location is not empty. Rating and number fields take greater-than, less-than and between; dropdown and tag take is, is any of, is none of; a checkbox takes only is and is not, because unticked is a value rather than an absence. - There is no sort. Shots stay in timeline order whatever you do; filter to
Rating is at least 4and read the survivors in cut order.
The search runs across your whole library, not one project. It evaluates every shot of every video you have imported, groups the hits by the video they came from, and ranks them so filter matches come first, then metadata matches, then transcript matches. That is the answer to the durability question u/cI_-__-_Io posed on r/editors in June 2026: "Naming helps when you already know what the shot is called. It doesn't help as much when you only remember 'I saw a shot that felt like X somewhere in this pile'." The same poster asked whether the index survives moving projects. StoryFolder's index is a local database keyed to frame numbers rather than a sidecar file living next to the media, so it survives you closing the project and opening a different one. It lives on that machine, so it does not survive a migration you have not planned for.
A search you run often can be saved as a Quick Filter, which stores what you typed, the filter stack and the view settings together, and puts all three back when you return to it. Collections gather shots from several projects into one named bin, which is useful for browsing and is a dead end for output: a collection cannot be exported or shared.
How do visual metadata and transcript search complement each other?
Dialogue search recovers what was said. Tags, text and dropdowns recover what was seen. Most footage libraries need both, and the split is more lopsided than transcript-first tools imply.
The open-source arkiv project (github.com/vulture-s/arkiv, read 2 September 2026) indexed a real production library of 1,506 clips, and its README records 1,161 of them as dialogue-free b-roll. That leaves 345 clips with anything spoken in them, so a transcript-only search reaches 23% of that library. Editors describe the same gap from the other direction: contributors on r/editors have reported finding far more in their selects than the transcription caught, and pointed out that a transcript cannot tell you where a voice cracked with emotion.
StoryFolder joins both at the shot rather than keeping the transcript as a separate document, so one query hits your labels and the dialogue in the same pass and tells you which one matched. The dialogue half degrades in the ways Whisper always degrades: heavy accents, people talking over each other, noisy location sound and specialist jargon. Words the model was unsure about are underlined rather than given a false confidence score. A music-only reel comes back as "No speech found", which is a result rather than an error.
What does the exported shot log contain?
One export writes both Shot List.csv and Shot List.xlsx into the same folder. You do not open one and re-save it as the other.
The columns, in order:
| Column | Value | Present when |
|---|---|---|
Frame |
the thumbnail, embedded in the XLSX cell | only with Images also enabled |
Filename |
Shot-1.png, Shot-2.png, … |
only with Images also enabled |
| your field titles | one column per shot-level field you switched on | for the fields you chose |
Start Timecode |
HH:MM:SS,mmm, elapsed |
always |
End Timecode |
HH:MM:SS,mmm, elapsed |
always |
Duration Timecode |
HH:MM:SS,mmm of the shot's length |
always |
First Frame |
integer | always |
Last Frame |
integer | always |
End Time |
seconds as a float | always |
There is no shot number column and no favourited column, whatever the help page says; if you need a shot number in the sheet, the row order is the shot order. Video-level fields never appear, so you will not get a column that is empty on every row.
Read the timecode columns as elapsed time from the first frame of the file you imported. A master that starts at 01:00:00:00 exports as 00:00:00,000. There is no reel, no drop-frame flag and no SMPTE frames field, so nothing here is safe for an automatic match back. Work from the First Frame and Last Frame integers, which are exact.
The transcript export is the other artefact, and it is the underrated one. Its CSV carries start, end, shot, speaker, text: every line of dialogue with the number of the shot it was spoken in, split per word where a sentence straddles a cut. That is a dialogue selects log you can sort and filter in Sheets, and it is free.
What the shot log will not preserve
No FCPXML, XML, EDL, AAF or OTIO, and no embedded source start timecode. No record of which drive the original media is on, and no index of anything you have not imported. For cataloguing drives, NeoFinder and DiskCatalogMaker are the tools. Cross-project collections cannot be exported or shared. And StoryFolder does not edit video by editing text; that is Descript's and Reduct's product, not this one.
FAQ
Does the search box match speaker names? No. It matches transcript text and your text, dropdown, tag and number field values. A speaker label is not part of that pass.
Can I tag 40 selected shots at once? No. Tags edit one shot at a time. Rating, dropdown, checkbox and text fields all bulk-edit across a selection in one undoable action.
Will changing detection sensitivity erase my notes? No. Re-detection preserves splits, joins and every metadata value, because values are keyed to frame numbers rather than stored inside the shot list.
Can I sort a board by star rating?
No. Filter to Rating is at least 4 and read the results in timeline order; there is no sort anywhere in the board.
Is the transcript a paid feature? No. On-device transcription and the SRT, VTT, TXT, CSV and Fountain exports are free. The spreadsheet export and custom fields are Pro.
Will a long stringout fit on the free plan? No. A free board caps at 12 shots and the cap applies before any filtering, so a real stringout needs Pro.
Can a cross-project collection become a shared board? No. Collections are for browsing shots from several projects together. They cannot be exported or published.